Category: Wanker

The Republicans Jump C. Megalodon

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C. Megalodon*

It appears with the implosion of Chris Christie over Bridgegate, Ted Cruz being loathed by every mainstream candidate in the nation, Jim DeMint being the architect of their disastrous government shutdown, Bobby Jindal being too creepy for words, Rick Perry being too stupid (too inarticulate, and ……… oops), Paul Ryan is too creepy, and Rand Paul being too ……… Rand Paul, the Republican Presidential bench is rather lacking for 2016.

It appears that the Republicans are casting about for a viable candidate, and Joe Scarborough’s name has been mooted:

For the past several months, we’ve heard a lot about Joe Scarborough’s blueprint for the Republican Party to get back on track.

 The congressman-turned-pundit has been talking about that stuff for years, of course, but it reached a fever pitch last November with the release of his book, “The Right Path.”

 “The buzz among GOP insiders is that ‘The Right Path’ has the potential to galvanize conservatives in the way Barry Goldwater’s ‘Conscience of a Conservative’ did half a century ago — especially conservatives ready to return to the winning ways of Ronald Reagan, who is on the cover, shown striding down the White House colonnade,” gushed Politico’s buzz arbiter Mike Allen.

 Scarborough talked to TPM about the book, casually suggesting that “Joe Scarborough’s worldview” was in sync with “Ronald Reagan’s worldview and Bill Buckley’s worldview and Margaret Thatcher’s worldview.”

 You knew where this was going.

 Inevitably, Joe Scarborough’s book tour was viewed as a springboard for Joe Scarborough’s 2016 presidential campaign. A few months after the book’s release, The Daily Caller’s Alex Pappas reported that it’s “widely believed” at MSNBC that Scarborough has presidential aspirations.

 Two days after that story ran, Scarborough told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he “won’t rule anything out.”

I know that somehow or other the Republicans will find a nominee in 2016, but this is beginning to look like the life cycle of a drummer for Spın̈al Tap.

*The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). But in either case, you are jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever.

Barack Obama, What’s Your F%$#ing Problem?

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OK, we now know that the CIA is accused of spying on and breaking into Congressional computers. We also know, thanks to Dan Froomkin, that John Brennan wrote a letter admitting that they hacked into the Senate staffers’ computers:

Brennan, in his own remarks after Feinstein’s speech on Tuesday, vaguely ridiculed allegations of CIA “hacking” and said that “when the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong.” But nothing he said actually disputed Feinstein’s version of events.

 And as Michael Masnick reported for Techdirt, a January 27 letter to Feinstein that Brennan  sent out to CIA staff on Tuesday actually confirmed the search, though Brennan described it — and the need for it — in the context of concern about a security breach:

Because we were concerned that there may be a breach or vulnerability in the system for housing highly classified documents, CIA conducted a limited review to determine whether these files were located on the SSCI [Senate Select Committee on Intelligence] side of the CIA network and reviewed audit data to determine whether anyone had accessed the files, which would have been unauthorized.

And he said he wasn’t done. “Only completion of the security review will answer how SSCI staff came into possession of the documents,” he wrote, saying that he had only “temporarily” suspended further action until getting Feinstein’s consent.

 The “breach” in question concerned the committee staff’s possession of an internal CIA review of the materials the agency had previously turned over to Feinstein’s committee during the course of the four-year congressional investigation into the Bush-era torture practices.

What is Barack Obama’s response?  Abuses by the CIA are someone else’s problem:

Barack Obama sought to distance the White House from the fierce dispute between top senators and the Central Intelligence Agency on Wednesday, claiming it would be inappropriate for his administration to become involved the clash over an investigation into the use of torture in post-9/11 interrogations.

 In the president’s first remarks about the dispute since Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence accused the CIA of a cover-up and intimidation directed at her staff, Obama said it was not a matter for the White House to “wade into at this point”.

This is something that you don’t “wade into at this point”?  Seriously?  How can this not be a matter that you need to “wade into at this point”?

You are the HMFIC.*  Do your F%$#ing job, and take charge!

The chief counsel of the CIA’s review of the Senate report is a subject of the investigation whose name is mentioned 1600 times.

This person also attempted to intimidate Senate staffers by filing a bogus criminal complaint.

And the head of the CIA, John Brennan is saying that everything is hunky-dory.

You are F%$#ing President of the F%$#ing United States of F%$#ing America.  How the F%$ is this not your F%$#ing job?

I don’t care how F%$#ing awsome you F%$#ing think you F%$#ing are, your mere existence does not constitute the “Hope” or the “Change” that have figured so prominently in your messaging.

Why the f%$# did you run to be President if you somehow don’t think that this this is not your f%$#ing job?

*Head Mother F%$#er In Charge.

Well, I Guess That It’s Better than Being Hit By a Bus (Or Not)

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Charlie Pierce listened to Sarah Palin’s closing speech at CPAC:

By now, and by god, it should have settled permanently in the consciousness of the nation what a huge and untoward gamble with the country John McCain and his campaign took in 2008 when they elevated Sarah Palin from her rightful place on the tundra to the political celebrity she currently enjoys. McCain should pay a heavy price for unleashing this ignorant, two-wheeled bilewagon on the country’s politics. If you think she’s a legitimate political leader, you’re an idiot and a sucker and I feel sorry for you.

Yesterday she gave a wildly received speech to ring down the curtain at CPAC. The applause, as far as I know, may still be going on. It was as singularly embarrassing a public address as any allegedly sentient primate ever has delivered. It was a disgrace to politics, to rhetoric, to the English language, and to seventh-grade slam books everywhere.

………

A friend bailed on the speech, making the very plausible case that Palin is simply another political celebrity freakshow, like Donald Trump. I can see the point there but, with Palin, and watching the hysterical reception her puerile screed received, there is something more serious going on. She is the living representation of the infantilization of American politics, a poisonous Grimm Sister telling toxic fairy tales to audiences drunk on fear, and hate and nonsense. She respects no standards but her own. She is in perpetual tantrum, railing against her betters, which is practically everyone, and volunteering for the job of avatar to the country’s reckless vandal of a political Id. It was the address of a malignant child delivered to an audience of malignant children. If you applauded, you’re an idiot and I feel sorry for you.

Actually, no.

Last year, my car got totaled by a tour bus while CPAC was going on, and it’s clear that Mr. Pierce had a WAY worse time this year at CPAC than I did last year getting hit by a bus.

Sarah Palin riffed on Green Eggs and Ham.

Read the whole thing, and shudder.

I Just Got F%$#ing Pwned (Owned) by a Man Who Has Been Dead for 224 Years

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I am referring, of course to Ben Franklin.

Andy Kaufman has nothing on post-death humor.

Specifically, when I blamed Ben Franklin for creating Daylight Saving Time, I neglected to do my research.

It turns out that Ben Franklin’s suggestion was satire:

During his time as an American envoy to France, Benjamin Franklin, publisher of the old English proverb, “Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”, anonymously published a letter suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. This 1784 satire proposed taxing shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise. Franklin did not propose DST; like ancient Rome, 18th-century Europe did not keep precise schedules. However, this soon changed as rail and communication networks came to require a standardization of time unknown in Franklin’s day.

I must remember: Google before shooting off my mouth.

It appears that I am not a hoopy frood who knows where my towel is.

Senate Votes Down Sexual Assault Accountability and the Army’s Top Sex Crime Prosecutor Relieved for Sex Crime

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On the same f%$#ing day as a filibuster killed sex crime prosecution reform in the Senate,  Lt. Col. Joseph “Jay” Morse, the top sex-crimes prosecutor in the US Army, was Asuspended for alleged sexual assault:

The top Army prosecutor for sexual assault cases has been suspended after a lawyer who worked for him recently reported he’d groped her and tried to kiss her at a sexual-assault legal conference more than two years ago.

………

Morse was removed from his job when the allegations came to light, one source said. To date, no charges have been filed in the case.

………

Sources told Stars and Stripes that the Army lawyer alleged that Morse attempted to kiss and grope her against her will. The alleged assault reportedly took place in a hotel room at a 2011 sexual assault legal conference attended by special victims prosecutors in Alexandria, Va., before he was appointed as chief of the Trial Counsel Assistance Program.

So long as those ratf%$#s in the Senate are unwilling to protect the troops from the corrupt elements in our officer corps, this crap will continue.

Bigoted Moron of the Day

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Randa Jarrar, who just penned, “Why I can’t stand white belly dancers,” on Salon.

Seeing as how I know about 1 half dozen white who have made a study of traditional, as in pre 1600, Middle Eastern dance. Somehow Ms. Jarrar, the product of Sara Lawrence and UT Austin, believes that their interest is somehow inauthentic.

Art is supposed to be universal, and cross cultural art can produce some amazing things.

Feh.

Hillary Drops the H-Bomb

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No, I do not mean thermonuclear weapons, I mean the full up Godwin.

She invoked Hitler on the events in the Ukraine:

Hillary Clinton Likens Russia’s Passport Move In Ukraine To Nazi Germany

Hillary Clinton likened aspects of Russia’s involvement in Crimean Ukraine to Nazi Germany during a fundraising event, according to two people present.

Buzzfeed, citing two sources, reported that the former secretary of State said at a fundraiser on Tuesday that Russia’s move to start issuing passports in Crimean Ukraine was akin to “population transfers” that happened in Nazi Germany during World War II.

“Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the 30s,” Clinton said according to the Long Beach Press-Telegram. “All the Germans that were … the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right. I must go and protect my people and that’s what’s gotten everybody so nervous.”

Seriously, her need to go to war at the drop of a hat was why she did not get the nomination in 2008, and here she is making John McCain look like Timothy Leary.

She is not going to be the President-Elect in November of 2016. Hillary Clinton just flushed that down the toilet.

Your Daily Dose of Ukraine Related Incompetence and Hypocrisy

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It turns out that one of the first acts of the new parliament in the “no-bigotry, ethnocentrism, or fascist parties here” Ukraine was to rescind the status of the Russian language one of the official languages of the Ukraine: (and note how this was buried at paragraph 5 of the story)

Officials in Moscow continued Tuesday to express displeasure with events in Ukraine, if not as harshly as the day before. One bill that flew through the Rada on Monday downgraded the status of Russian as an official language, which struck critics as an unnecessary and incendiary move and which opened Ukraine’s new authorities to stinging criticism from their larger neighbor.

Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, tweeted Tuesday, “We want to curtail the influence of radicals and nationalists who are trying to play first fiddle in Ukraine.”

Note that this story was from February 25, 4 days before Russia sent troops.

Do you think that there is any connection?

As Ted Rall pithily observes that, “Millions of ethnic Russians in former Soviet Republics have suffered widespread discrimination and harassment since the 1991 collapse — and that their troubles began with laws eliminating Russian as an official language.”

BTW, the person who seems to be deepest in our shenanigans in the Ukraine, you know, things like funding the Neo-Nazi Svoboda party the Pravyi Sektor militia, that would be Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, who is literally in bed with the Neocons.

I mean it.  She is married to Robert Kagan, who is not just a Neocon, but is pretty the much the ur-Neocon, having co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) which has called for:

  • The overthrow of Saddam Hussein (1999)
  • The overthrow of Saddam Hussein, because he was behind 9/11 (2001)
  • Called for American hegemony across the world
  • Repeatedly called for preemptive military strikes
  • Permanent U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia
  • Hostilities with China

Yeah, he founded the group that more than any other organization put us in Iraq.

And his reward for this? 

Why, he is on the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board.

How do these folks, and here I am referring to both the Neocons like Kagan and Nuland, and Liberal Interventionists like the Samantha Powers, continue to maintain influence in our foreign policy?

Why is an an uninterrupted record of failure, misery, and the death of innocents considered an endorsement for greater responsibilities in Washington, DC?

It’s like promoting the guy who designed the Edsel to run the company.

I Don’t Think that I’ve Ever Seen Jon Stewart Angrier

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John Stewart and Larry Wilmore tear into professional bigot Fox News Legal analyst Andrew Napolitano for rolling out standard grossly KKK/Sons of the Confederacy lies.

Notice that they are both smiling.

They are f5$#ing outraged, and the smiles never leave their faces, and Wilmore draws blood when he compares Napolitano’s differing attitudes on the Civil War and the Revolutionary war, “You know, there’s something not right when you feel the only black thing worth fighting for is tea,” but he drives a much deserved stake through the anti-tax libertarianism espoused by Napolitano, and Fox, when he says, “You think it’s immoral for the government to reach into your pocket, rip your money away from its warm home and claim it as its own property, money that used to enjoy unfettered freedom is now conscripted to do whatever its new owner tells it to. Now, I know this is going to be a leap, but you know that sadness and rage you feel about your money? Well, that’s the way some of us feel about people.”

It’s frightening that such a contemptible human being as Napolitano was once a judge.

Just watch.

The War on Drugs Goes from Dishonesty to Parody in Annapolis

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The Annapolis police chief testified about the 37 people who died of marijuana overdoses on the first day of legalization in Colorado.

There is a small problem with this testimony, it never happened.  In fact the source of the story was the satirical website the Daily Current:

Testifying against bills proposed in Maryland to legalize and decriminalize marijuana, Annapolis Police Chief Michael Pristoop cited a hoax story that claimed 37 people died the first day marijuana was legalized in Colorado.

“The first day of legalization, that’s when Colorado experienced 37 deaths that day from overdose on marijuana,” Pristoop said in testimony at Tuesday’s Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee hearing. “I remember the first day it was decriminalized there were 37 deaths.”

But Sen. Jamie Raskin, D-Montgomery, who has proposed a bill that would legalize, regulate and tax the drug, immediately fact-checked Pristoop.

“Unless you have some other source for this, I’m afraid I’ve got to spoil the party here,” Raskin said. “Your assertion that 37 people died of a marijuana overdose in Colorado was a hoax on the DailyCurrant and the Comedy Central website.”

Our drug penal/enforcement industry is a waste of resources, and people like Michael Pristoop should find honest productive work.

No, This is Not the Onion

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Jack Burkman, a long time right wing lobbyist is writing legislation to ban gays from the NFL:

“Imagine your son being forced to shower with a gay man,” Burkman said in a statement. “That’s a horrifying prospect for every mom in the country. What in the world has this nation come to?”

Of course, your son is already showering with gay men in gym class, at the health club, in the US military, in the NFL, and in the US Congress. The only difference is that in some of those places, your son is simply not aware of who the gay guy is. The NFL being more welcoming to gays won’t change the simple fact that just because you don’t know who’s gay, doesn’t mean the gay men aren’t already there.

Normally, I would say that kicker to this story is that his brother James is gay and out, and thinks that Jack is an asshole:

But this is not the kicker to this story.

The kicker to the story was that he was on the DC Madame’s phone list.

So, Jack was a ……… John. (He denies it ……… Yeah ……… Sure)

It Appears that This Guy Got His Law Degree from Bob Jones University

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In a world of right wing hack judges issuing morally indefensible options, Federal District Judge William Martini has set a contemptible new standard:

The first legal challenge to the New York police department’s blanket surveillance of Muslims in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks has been dismissed by a federal judge in New Jersey in a ruling that lawyers acting for the plaintiffs have described as preposterous and dangerous.

Judge William Martini, sitting in the US district court for the district of New Jersey, threw out a lawsuit brought by eight Muslim individuals and local businesses who alleged their constitutional rights were violated when the NYPD’s mass surveillance was based on religious affiliation alone. The legal action was the first of its type flowing from the secret NYPD project to map and monitor Muslim communities across the east coast that was exposed by a Pulitzer prize-winning series of articles in 2011 by the Associated Press.

In his judgment, released on Thursday, Martini dismisses the complaint made by the plaintiffs that they had been targeted for police monitoring solely because of their religion. He writes: “The more likely explanation for the surveillance was a desire to locate budding terrorist conspiracies. The most obvious reason for so concluding is that surveillance of the Muslim community began just after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The police could not have monitored New Jersey for Muslim terrorist activities without monitoring the Muslim community itself.”

………

The Martini decision absolves the NYPD of having caused distress or damage to Muslims caught by its mass surveillance on the unusual grounds that were it not for the Associated Press disclosure of the secret programme, those targeted by the monitoring would have been unaware that it was happening.

“The Associated Press covertly obtained the materials and published them without authorization. Thus the injury, if any existed, is not fairly traceable to the City,” Martini writes.

Later in the judgment, he adds: “Nowhere in the complaint do plaintiffs allege that they suffered harm prior to the unauthorized release of the documents by the Associated Press. This confirms that plaintiffs’ alleged injuries flow from the Associated Press’s unauthorized disclosure of the documents. The harms are not ‘fairly traceable’ to any act of surveillance.”

So, it’s OK to profile Muslims, and possibly entrap them, so long as you do not about it?

This judge seems to think that it makes sense to send spies into girls schools.

This is f%$#ing insane, and I hope that this Bush appointee’s ruling is overruled before the ink is dry.

Pass the F%$#ing Popcorn

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There are now rumors that former Congressman and current MSNBC journalistic impersonater Joe Scarborough is considering a run for President:

This is only slightly less embarrassing than engaging with a rumor about Donald Trump, how do they say, “mulling a presidential bid,” so let’s start with an apology: I’m sorry. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get down to the lowly business of the day. Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC’s wake-up chat show “Morning Joe,” is “mulling a presidential bid,” according to a couple of anonymous people and Mark McKinnon, who spoke to Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller website. What a world.

Even without the inevitability of some Republican Karl Rove wannabee making an issue of Lori Klausutis, his candidacy would make the Freddie Dalton Thompson clown look like the Obama campaign.

BTW, that rumbling you feel is not an earthquake.  It is the writing staff of The Daily Show frantically high fiving each other. 

Mixed Emotions

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When something bad is happening to an group of truly awful people, I frequently experience schadenfreude.

When it in suggest negative implications for the rest of us, my feelings are more mixed.

Case in point, the defamation suit that may bankrupt the National Review:

National Review, founded by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955, has had an enormous impact on the nation’s politics. Its writers formulated the ideology that animated the quixotic Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964, and then Ronald Reagan’s successful run for the White House in 1980. In the years since, National Review has often worked to keep Republican presidents focused on implementing its vision of conservatism, while bucking up the conservative troops when the movement has found itself out of power.

Today the magazine enjoys circulation roughly equivalent to that of The Nation, the American Left’s leading journal of opinion, and more than twice that of William Kristol’s The Weekly Standard, its primary competition on the Right.

And now, National Review may be fighting for its life.

Climate scientist Michael Mann is suing National Review and Mark Steyn, one of its leading writers, for defamation. It’s a charge that’s notoriously hard to prove, which is no doubt why the magazine initially refused to apologize for an item on its blog in which Steyn accused Mann of fraud. Steyn also quoted a line by another conservative writer (Rand Simberg) that called Mann “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data.” (Simberg and the free market think tank for which he works, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, are also named in the suit.)

The lawsuit has not been going well for the magazine. In July, Judge Natalia Combs Greene rejected a motion to dismiss the suit. The defendants appealed, and last week D.C. Superior Court Judge Frederick Weisberg rejected the motion again, opening the door for the discovery phase of the lawsuit to begin.

That’s not all. On Christmas Eve, Steyn (who regularly guest hosts Rush Limbaugh’s radio show) wrote a blog post in which he excoriated Greene, accusing her of incompetence, stupidity, and obtuseness. As a result of this outburst, the law firm that had been representing National Review and Steyn (Steptoe & Johnson) has dropped Steyn as a client and reportedly has plans to withdraw as counsel for the magazine as well.

Part of me hopes that The National Review gets sued into oblivion.    It is a pernicious organization, and it has been since Buckley founded it, and filled it with Oh-So-Civilized support for segregation.

Part of me worries that the Kochs will start funding SLAPP suits against in an attempt to intimidate real news gathering organizations.

And so I leave it with all of you: Which came out of the opened door – the lady, or the tiger?

H/t Salon.

Not Enough Bullets………

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It appears that the hyper wealthy think that people not liking them or how they make money is just like the holocaust, “Seems like billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins is very, very afraid of progressives. In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Perkins expressed his deep fear that fascist progressives were going to burn down the city.”

He actually invoked Kristallnacht:

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these “techno geeks” can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a “snob” despite the millions she has spent on our city’s homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.

This is ludicrous.

BTW, San Francisco has a law against private vehicles blocking bus-stops, as the aforementioned Google buses do. It’s a $271 fine, and this means something north of $½ billion in fines have been ignored by the city by various tech firms, because big tech is above the law.

The idea that somehow or other, either criticism or legitimate law enforcement actions directed toward the extremely wealthy is somehow a fascist style persecution against the 0.01% is both pernicious and laughable.

Mike Huckabee is Terrified of Women’s Libidos

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Yesterday, I asserted that the abortion criminalization right wants to punish women for their own sexuality.

Today, Mike Huckabee removed all doubt:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said the Republican Party is waging a “war for women,” at a meeting of the Republican National Committee Thursday.

Addressing a luncheon of committee-members, staffers, and operatives, Huckabee took aim at Democrats who accuse the GOP of waging a “war on women” with its policies against abortion and government-subsidized birth control.

“Republicans don’t have a war on women,” Huckabee said. We’re having a war for women. To empower them to be something other than victims of their gender.”

“If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control, because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it,” he continued. “Let us take that discussion all across America, because women are far more than the Democrats have played them to be.”

Great shades of Elvis.

Cannot control their libido?

Unless Huckabee has some girl-on-girl fantasies and a turkey baster, there is, you know, a  penis involved in sex and conception.

Controlling their reproductive system?  That is the definition of birth control.

What is it about Republicans?   Are they still fuming over the fact that they couldn’t get laid during the “Summer of Love” in 1967?

I couldn’t get laid in 1967 either, but in my defense, I turned 5 years old that year.

I would also note that (most of the time, anyway) don’t act like a 5 year old these days, but it appears that Republicans have not managed that trick.

Supertramp?!?!?!? Let Me Get This Straight, 911 & ……… Supertramp?

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As my son is wont to say, What the F%$#ing F%$#?

“Breakfast in America” is a 1979 record by the British rock group Supertramp. Its cover artwork features a smiling waitress who is standing in for the Statue of Liberty.* Behind her stands the New York City skyline, including the twin towers. It’s weird.

According to the latest theory from the 9/11 truther community, however, Supertramp’s album cover was never just a jokey little piece of absurdist art. What was it instead? A prophecy of doom.

Try to follow us on this one, because as one might suspect from a new 9/11 truth theory provided today (some 10-plus years after the attacks), things get a bit complicated.

The Supertramp theory, if we can call it that, is derived from the brain of one member of an online forum for David Icke (he of the evil lizard overlords theory) named “Eve.”

It gets even weirder and pathetic.

Wanker of the Day: Yale University

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Before Plugin                                    After Plugin  

Yale has a course selection website, and a two students, Harry Yu and Peter Xu, came up with a personal website that aggregated the ratings so that students could look at ratings and workload when selecting a course.

Yale blocked the site, and threatened disciplinary action against them so another student, Sean Haufler,  wrote a Google Chrome shortcut that does this on the fly.

Basically, Yale does not want students to access this data in a coherent way, because, tenured professors who cannot or will not teach do not want students avoiding their courses:

In January 2012, two Yale students named Harry Yu and Peter Xu built a replacement to Yale’s official course selection website. They it called YBB+ (Yale Bluebook Plus), a “plus” version of the Yale-owned site, called Yale Bluebook. YBB+ offered different functionality from the official site, allowing students to sort courses by average rating and workload. The official Yale Bluebook, rather, showed a visual graph of the distribution of student ratings as well as a list of written student reviews. YBB+ offered a more lightweight user interface and facilitated easier comparison of course statistics. Students loved it. A significant portion of the student body started using it.

Fast-forward two years. Last Friday (1/10/14), Yale blocked YBB+’s IP address on the school network without warning. When contacted, Yale said that YBB+ infringed upon Yale’s trademark. Harry and Peter quickly removed the Yale name from the site, rebranded it as CourseTable and relaunched. Yale blocked the website again, declaring the website to be malicious activity.

Later that weekend, Yale’s administration told the student developers that the school didn’t approve of the use of its course evaluation data, saying that their website “let students see the averaged evaluations far too easily”. Harry and Peter were told to remove the feature from the CourseTable website or else they would be referred to the school’s punishment committee.

………

And then it hit the internet:

Finally, Mary Miller, the Dean of Yale College, wrote an open letter to Yale on Friday night. In this letter, she defended Yale’s decision to censor Harry and Peter’s website and course rating functionality, stating:

“[Yale’s course] evaluations… became available to students only in recent years and with the understanding that the information they made available to students would appear only as it currently appears on Yale’s sites — in its entirety.”


Worded less diplomatically, it appears the Dean of Yale College is expressing to students that, “You can use our course evaluation data, but only if you view the data as we tell you to view it”.

(emphasis original)

And there were the inevitable claims of copyright and trademark infringement, and Mr. Haufler came up with his solution:

The story does not end here, however, since there’s a way to distinguish the freedom of speech issue from the copyright claims. What if someone made a piece of software that displays Yale’s course evaluation data in a way that Yale disapproves of, while also (1) not infringing on Yale’s copyrights or trademarks, (2) not storing any sensitive data, (3) not scraping or collecting Yale’s data, and (4) not causing damages to Yale’s network or servers? If Yale censors this piece of software or punishes the software developer, it would clearly characterize Yale as an institution where having authority over students trumps freedom of speech.

Guess what? I made it last night.

I built a Chrome Extension called Banned Bluebook. It modifies the Chrome browser to add CourseTable’s functionality to Yale’s official course selection website, showing the course’s average rating and workload next to each search result. It also allows students to sort these courses by rating and workload. This is the original site, and this is the site with Banned Bluebook enabled (this demo uses randomly generated rating values).

Banned Bluebook never stores data on any servers. It never talks to any non-Yale servers. Moreover, since my software is smarter at caching data locally than the official Yale course website, I expect that students using this extension will consume less bandwidth over time than students without it. Don’t believe me? You can read the source code. No data ever leaves Yale’s control. Trademarks, copyright infringement, and data security are non-issues. It’s 100% kosher.

………

If Yale denies this right, I’ll see you at the punishment committee.

Here’s hoping that Yale backs down.  If not, I hope that you talk to the ACLU.

In my day, of course, we had to talk to each other, I recall a materials course, taught by a Professor Clapp, was called “Catching the Clapp,” but I only discovered that after I was half way through the class.

I appreciate the value of tenure, but this should not be a justification for erecting the, “The Great Firewall of Yale.”

It’s not like their jobs are at stake over this, just their egos.

Added to My List of They Who Must Not Be Named ……… for a While, at Least ………

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Victoria Jackson, the ditsy SNL alum who has devolved into right wing parody, has been added to my, “They Who Must Not Be Named,” list.

Normally, she would be beneath the level of notice sufficient to get on the list, but seeing as how she is making noises about running for public office, I have put her on the list, at least until she actually runs:

I’m a proud, unabashed, and unapologetic Liberal. No surprise there, eh? That said, I’m not one to believe that only people who think like me are worthy of being involved in our political process. Yes, I believe most of today’s Conservative ideology is not just wrong, but dangerously so, but I think our democracy is best served by having both sides of the political/ideological fence represented. If nothing else, maintaining that sort of balance/tug of war helps to prevent the sorts of excess that can happen when one party enjoys an unbreakable grip on power.

Our democracy works best (and arguably only works at all) when those involved in setting policy have both feet firmly grounded in reality. With the advent of the Tea Party, that reality has been repeatedly proven to be elusive. The examples are too numerous to mention. Government doesn’t work when the people involved in it are, for lack of a more polite description, bat-$#!% crazy. I say this because it’s comes to light that Victoria Jackson, the Tea Party’s Queen of Bat-$#!% Crazy, is contemplating getting into politics. For reasons known only to herself, Jackson thinks she actually has something of value to offer. Unfortunately, the ability and willingness to repeatedly make a fool of oneself publicly isn’t much of a resume for an aspiring public servant. ………

In the name of all that is holy, I hope never to write of her ever again, but if she actually runs for office………

Not a Photoshop, Not The Onion

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This is where the spill occurred


Look at the detail on the billboard

If you do a Google maps of 2237 Pennsylvania Ave, Charleston, WV 25302, and then you do a Street View, you will see that it is right across from Freedumb Industries, the company that tainted water for 300,000 people in West Virginia.

If you do a street view, you will notice that there is a billboard which says, “The President talks about creating jobs, but his EPA is destroying jobs.”

Irony, you are soaking in it!

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS